Mr. Pell was stricken with Parkinson’s disease at the end of his Senate career, and his illness forced him to retire in January 1997 after six terms in the Senate. His death was confirmed by Thomas G. Hughes, his former chief of staff.

Mr. Pell, a Democrat, was widely regarded as the most formidable politician in Rhode Island history; in six statewide victories over Republican opponents, he received an average of 64 percent of the vote.

Mr. Pell was best known for devising legislation that created the program that has dispensed grants to tens of millions of poor and middle-class college students.

He often remarked that he had been motivated to help students meet the high cost of a college education because the G.I. Bill of Rights — the program of federal educational grants to returning service members after World War II — had meant so much to him personally. The fact was that with Mr. Pell’s vast family wealth, derived from an 18th-century royal charter of land from King George III of England, he could have purchased some of the educational institutions they attended, let alone paid their tuition bills.

Mr. Pell, whose ancestors were the original lords of the manor in Pelham Manor, N.Y., lived among the old-money families in Newport. Five of his relatives have been elected to either the House or the Senate, including his father, a one-term representative from Manhattan’s old Silk Stocking District.

After winning his first Senate term in 1960, Mr. Pell, a Princeton graduate, sponsored the preparation of a large two-volume statistical report in 1963 that became the basis of the bill creating the Basic Educational Opportunity Grant, or BEOG, which provided financial aid for the needy to attend college.

Asked in an interview in 1996 how the programs came to be known as the Pell Grants, he wisecracked: “Because there was no Senator Beog!” In fact, the name was officially changed to Pell Grants in 1980 by his admiring colleagues in Congress.

Mr. Pell also was the author of the National Foundation of the Arts and the Humanities Act of 1965. That legislation paved the way for the National Endowment for the Arts, which makes federal grants to artists and arts organizations, and the National Endowment for the Humanities, which channels federal money in literature, history, language and philosophy, among other fields.

The creation of the National Endowment for the Arts did much over the years to foster avant-garde styles and techniques that made American artists renowned worldwide for work that Mr. Pell personally disliked.

“I don’t like abstract paintings,” he told an interviewer in 1996, saying he had no use for any artwork “more abstract than Picasso’s Blue Period.”

“I think that many of the grants made to artists by the endowment were mistakes,” he said, adding quickly, “But I’ll never intrude.”

A lifelong interest in railroads inspired him to draft a bill that became the High Speed Ground Transportation Act of 1965, intended to improve rail service in the 400-mile Northeast corridor from Washington to Boston. Out of this emerged the Amtrak system and, in 1966, Mr. Pell’s well-received book “Megalopolis Unbound: The Supercity and the Transportation of Tomorrow.”

Mr. Pell vigorously opposed the war in Vietnam and sponsored a treaty banning nuclear weapons on the ocean floor. He became chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in 1987, only to lose the post to Senator Jesse Helms of North Carolina after the Republicans captured the Senate in 1994.

Mr. Pell, in his conduct of the Foreign Relations Committee, was sometimes criticized as insufficiently forceful. “If Claiborne has any weaknesses, he is too much of a gentleman,” Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr., Democrat of Delaware and now the vice president-elect, once said. To this characterization, Mr. Pell replied, “I am not confrontational by nature.”

But he also stood out for taking unconventional positions and staying with them. In contrast to almost all his Senate colleagues and to several administrations, he advocated an end to the isolation of Communist Cuba by the United States. He called for a policy of small steps toward normalizing relations with Cuba, an approach that later gained broader support.

He challenged President Ronald Reagan’s support of Nicaraguan guerrillas fighting the Marxist Sandinista government. He was also a dedicated supporter of negotiations to reduce nuclear arsenals. In 1988, he led the successful effort in the Senate to obtain ratification of the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty.

Photo

Senator Claiborne Pell served six terms in office, until 1997.Credit
Stephen Crowley/The New York Times

In 1964, Senator Pell supported President Lyndon B. Johnson’s request for legislative endorsement of a widened American military role in Indochina, the Gulf of Tonkin resolution. But he later said his support had been one of his biggest legislative mistakes, and he soon became an outspoken opponent of the war in Vietnam.

His opposition to American military intervention in foreign conflicts extended in the early 1980s to Lebanon and El Salvador and, in the early 1990s, to American engagement in Bosnia and Herzegovina.

Claiborne deBorda Pell was born in Manhattan on Nov. 22, 1918, the only child of Herbert Claiborne Pell and Matilda Bigelow Pell, an immensely wealthy couple from Newport. After Herbert Pell served his term in Congress, he was appointed by President Franklin D. Roosevelt to diplomatic posts in Hungary and Portugal.

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The Pells traced their New England ancestry to the 1700s and their wealth from vast land holdings in what is now Westchester County, N.Y. In Mr. Pell’s Senate office hung a painting of Vice President George M. Dallas, a great-great-granduncle who served from 1845 to 1849.

After attending private schools, including St. George’s School in Newport, Mr. Pell earned a degree in history at Princeton in 1940. Upon graduation, he went to Europe to help people persecuted by the Nazis and was twice detained. Four months before the bombing of Pearl Harbor, he enlisted in the Coast Guard as a seaman. He served on convoy and did patrol duty in the North Atlantic and the Mediterranean. He remained devoted to the Coast Guard, retiring from the Reserve in 1978 as a captain.

Because of an attack of undulant fever, he was sent for recuperation at the Naval Hospital in Newport in 1944. There he met Nuala O’Donnell, whom he married later that year. The couple had four children, Herbert Claiborne III, Christopher Hartford, Nuala Dallas Yates and Julia. In addition to his wife, he is survived by Christopher, known as Toby, of Newport, and Ms. Yates, of New York, along with five grandchildren and five great-grandchildren.

Having attended the conference in San Francisco at which the United Nations was established in 1945, Mr. Pell remained an unstinting supporter of the organization.

He obtained a master’s degree in international relations at Columbia University in 1946 and joined the State Department, which sent him to Bratislava, Czechoslovakia, to open a consulate. Six months later, he was expelled by the Communist government, then worked in Italy and at the State Department in Washington until 1952.

He spent the next eight years in the investment banking business and working for the Democratic Party. In 1956 he also served as vice president of the International Rescue Committee, helping refugees who had made their way to Austria after the Hungarian uprising that year was crushed by the Soviet Union.

After 93-year-old Theodore Green, the grand old man of Rhode Island politics, retired from the Senate, Mr. Pell ran for his seat and was elected in 1960. Although clearly patrician, Mr. Pell had a pro-union record, and that, along with his unassuming manner, kept him in good standing with a predominantly blue-collar electorate that had voted Democratic since 1930.

Mr. Pell’s eccentricities and his ability to laugh at himself endeared him to colleagues and constituents.

After he met President Fidel Castro of Cuba in Havana in 1974, Mr. Castro lit up a large cigar and used it to wave farewell. Senator Pell apparently thought the lighted cigar was a parting gift and took it from Mr. Castro’s hand, leaving his host flabbergasted.

John Chafee, who served as a Republican senator from Rhode Island, recounted a story for The Associated Press that became a favorite in descriptions of his colleague.

Mr. Pell was campaigning in Providence in 1972 when it began raining hard. He sent an aide to get him a pair of rubbers for his shoes, and when the aide returned, Mr. Pell asked in his formal manner of speech, “To whom am I indebted for these fine rubbers?”

“I got them at Thom McAn, Senator,” the aide answered, referring to the shoe store chain. Mr. Pell replied, “Well, do tell Mr. McAn that I am much obliged to him.”

Mr. Pell was an avid jogger, but he often wore a tweed sport coat when running, and he pushed for Congressional investigations into ESP and U.F.O.’s.

And when a campaign opponent once sneered at him for his patrician ways, branding him “a cream puff,” Mr. Pell responded by promptly obtaining the endorsement of a bakers’ union.

Mr. Biden said in a statement that Mr. Pell had been a mentor to him and called him “one of our nation’s most important voices in foreign policy for over 30 years.” Because of Mr. Pell, he said: “The doors of college have been opened to millions of Americans — and will continue to be opened to millions more. That is a legacy that will live on for generations to come.”

Correction: January 8, 2009

An obituary on Friday about Claiborne Pell, the former senator from Rhode Island best known as the author of the college grant program that bears his name, misidentified the university from which he received a master’s degree in international relations. It was Columbia, not Princeton.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A21 of the New York edition with the headline: Claiborne Pell, 90, Patrician Senator Behind College Grant Program, Dies. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe